Annie Gallup Weather Album a Portent of Intelligence

ANNIE GALLUP

Weather

Waterbug 0093

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If you can imagine what Beat poets might have sounded like if they were singers and preferred string quartets to bebop jazz, you get an inkling of Annie Gallup’s latest. It’s a literate and introspective collection of poems, spoken word presentation, and song. The music is arranged by Asia Mei, a classically trained pianist and composer with the soul of a jazz gypsy. If you never thought that a string quartet could have edge, listen to this recording and get back to me. The songs and poems are at once deeply personal and reflective of Gallup’s musings of living in a nation at war, an experience she approaches with equal parts disgust and sorrow. Along the way she also touches on the passing of cultural icons Janet Leigh and Suzanne Pleshette—sort of. Like everything on this intelligent album, the surfaces serve to tantalize you to scratch them and probe more deeply. And, yes, Weather is an ironic title. Think Bob Dylan’s dictum “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.”